River of Stars Read online

  Aggression didn’t mean viciousness. No mutilations were inflicted upon the Jeni guards. The boys were simply killed. Sometimes in warfare one tribe might be savage with the men and women of another, and in the past they usually had been like that with a taken Kitan city. That was deliberate, a tactic, a tool of war to discourage resistance.

  There was no message to send tonight. The Altai had no hatred of the Jeni, though their leaders bore little respect for O-Pang since his embarrassing, placating dance before the Xiaolu emperor. The Jeni were only a first, necessary step, a beginning.

  This night attack was—looked at one way—the breaking of an oath sworn after that night of dancing, and the Altai had always vested pride in keeping oaths and taking revenge on those who did not.

  On the other hand, as their war-leader’s clever brother had explained, if they denied that the Xiaolu were above them, that their drunken, puffed-up emperor was the Altai’s lord, the oath had no authority at all.

  They had accepted the much more numerous Xiaolu for a long time. That was finished, from tonight. Their entire tribe was across the river, down from their own lands. They were all on the move, women and children and the aged, and their herds. They would not cease moving until this was over, one way or another way. It had been decided that this would be so, and sworn by firelight.

  The origins of this rising dated back to dancing around another fire. They ran straight as a spear from that night to this one, when everything began to change under the sky. Not just here in a Jeni encampment by the Black River, but in the world, rippling a long way.

  Daiyan and the outlaws did not linger in the village after Tuan Lung saved the girl from the demon possessing her.

  In the morning, setting out to go back east, Lung had people grasping at his hands to kiss them, pleading for him to stay and heal a variety of afflictions. This happened often.

  He excused himself, offering the urgency of vague, large affairs. Ren Daiyan and his men, true to Daiyan’s promise, guarded him. They were undisturbed on the way back to Dizeng Village.

  Daiyan rode beside him in the afternoon, through a sleepinducing, late-season heat.

  “The bones we buried and dug up?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why?”

  Lung looked over at him. They were riding easily, in no hurry. You couldn’t hurry on donkeys. The fields nearby were brown. They would need rain, or suffering would come. He knew about that. It had led him to this life. Some of the arcane priests did rain ceremonies for a fee. Sometimes they worked.

  “People need help, an explanation, to understand why they fall ill, why they are healed.”

  “Did you drive a spirit out of her body?”

  “I healed her.”

  “And the boy? The one who speaks in strange words and falls unconscious when you do your rite?”

  “You were listening?”

  Daiyan said nothing.

  Lung shrugged. “I told you, people need help to understand.”

  “She fell ill when they arranged her marriage?”

  “Yes,” said Lung, “so it appears.”

  He looked at Daiyan and allowed himself a smile. “How much help do you need?”

  After a moment the younger man smiled back. “This is enough, Teacher Tuan.”

  “I do good along this road,” Tuan said. “We may not always understand how it happens.”

  They reached Dizeng in the afternoon. As the larger village came in sight, Daiyan halted his donkey and lifted a hand so the others behind would do the same.

  He turned to Lung again. “You are going to Jingxian? We cannot escort you there. I will have Ziji find honest men to guard you east with your money. It will be my honour to pay for them. I hope you will allow that. You did what I asked of you, and I am grateful.”

  His courtesy was extreme.

  “What about you? Back across the river? To the marsh?”

  Daiyan smiled. “You knew I crossed from there?”

  “It makes sense, when you think about it.”

  “Much does, when you think about it. But no, I’m not going back.”

  “Oh?”

  Daiyan looked ahead, to where country road became dusty village street. “I am meeting with the magistrate here.”

  “Wang Fuyin? You spoke with him, you said.”

  “About his case, about you. Now ... about myself. And these others.”

  Tuan Lung stared at him. He opened his mouth. He said nothing, however. After a moment, they moved on, entered the village.

  The next morning, heading east with the promised guards, setting out early before the heat, it occurred to him that he might have said to Ren Daiyan right there on the path, “Take me with you.”

  He’d have become a different man, reached a different destination with his life. He knew it even then, riding out under birdsong in morning light.

  There are forks in every road, choices we make.

  CHIEF MAGISTRATE WANG FUYIN, loyally serving his emperor in the important city of Jingxian, with responsibility for a number of larger and smaller towns, had been in the yamen of Dizeng Village towards evening, the day before.

  He had stayed because he was expecting a visitor.

  It surprised him, how keenly he was anticipating this meeting. But then, his life had been changed by this man, and it was a part of the Cho Master’s teachings that certain persons can occur and recur in the fabric of one’s life. Magistrate Wang felt at ease in thinking that the man he was waiting for was important to him.

  For one thing, he had solved the case he’d travelled here to deal with—a particularly bloody killing—by virtue of information given to him by that same man, seen without warning here, years after their last moment together.

  He remembered another autumn, a country path, leaves falling and fallen, in the west. Arrows from a boy, saving their lives. Then the boy was gone—into the forest, snatched from his life, claimed by the trees.

  Wang Fuyin had never considered himself a poet, but images had come to him. He’d written a poem about that day. Sent it to friends in Hanjin and elsewhere, men he’d taken the examinations with. It had been unexpectedly well received, even reached the court, he was told.

  In the winter and spring that had followed, Wang Fuyin had begun working very hard, not just at his tasks as sub-prefect, but learning all he could about the duties of magistrates.

  He’d solved that crime in Guan Family Village, the one he’d been on his way to investigate. Had he been abducted or killed on the road a murderer might never have been apprehended. Justice had been served.

  Fuyin had been young enough to feel a force asserting itself, claiming attention, pushing him forward. He really wasn’t a poet—the way he thought of it changed all the time.

  He wrote a small reflection that summer, a primer for magistrates identifying matters they needed to attend to when called to investigate a crime. He based it on one from the Eighth Dynasty, identified that, but added a great deal that was specific to their own time.

  This, too, was well received. And this, too, reached the court. The prime minister himself, illustrious Hang Dejin, read it (or intimated that he had). He sent particular commendation, along with a gift of cash and a promotion in the emperor’s name (of course) to the position of magistrate in a larger city, a real place, as Fuyin’s suddenly much happier wife put it.

  Another promotion, to the sixth rank of the civil service, had followed a year ago, bringing them to the even more real city of Jingxian. He’d teased his wife by describing it that way, reminding her of her own words. By that point she was so impressed with her startlingly ascendant husband that she’d giggled, pleasingly.

  Once they were established in Jingxian, she’d taken measures and arranged for his first concubine—a lovely thing, musical, well trained in many ways, and (of course) a symbol of their rise in the world.

  He’d written and had printed another small essay on the proper conduct of a magistrate when investigating crimes of vio
lence. He was told that his writings were becoming obligatory reading for younger civil servants. An examination question this spring had apparently been based on one of them!

  A posting to Hanjin seemed a reasonable thing to begin to (cautiously) imagine, although beyond that Fuyin did not speculate. He knew his wife did. He told his concubine as much, in bed at night.

  He had changed, and not just in his circumstances. He was clever enough to know that without those inward changes he might still be a lazy and bitter civil servant in a remote prefecture (with a bitter wife).

  When word came to the yamen of Jingxian last fall that a young outlaw from the marshes south of the river had led a group that attacked a Flowers and Rocks party and had killed six of them himself with rapid and precise arrows, Fuyin was intrigued by a possibility.

  As magistrate it was within his office to summon the surviving members of the party and he did so. They gave him a description.

  Obviously, the man leading such an outlaw band would not be identical in appearance to the fifteen-year-old boy he’d last seen walking into the forest near Guan Family Village, but ...

  It seemed there were tales told about this archer. One of them was that he’d come to the marsh from the far west and was notoriously the outlaws’ best bowman and youngest leader.

  It was enough for Fuyin to do something that was both an act of kindness and something more complex. He wrote the father, his one-time clerk.

  It was known along the Great River which villages the outlaws sometimes visited. He informed the father where a letter might possibly find his son.

  He’d liked Ren Yuan, a diligent, dignified man. Had appreciated him more when his own changes had begun. He’d even shown the father his first small book and been grateful for diffident (but useful) comments made before it was printed.

  He didn’t know if Clerk Ren would send a letter to his boy, he didn’t know if anything would come of it if he did. He didn’t even know for certain that the outlaw with the bow was Ren Daiyan.

  Sometimes you tossed a stone into a pool.

  Then one day, having come to Dizeng to deal with a murder, he did know—and all answers were affirmative, to his very great pleasure.

  IT WAS ODD, in a way, but walking towards his second visit to the yamen, Daiyan was more apprehensive than he had been the first time. In most ways, that made no sense.

  Three days ago, he’d had no idea how the magistrate he’d known as a boy would receive an outlaw leader from the marsh. Daiyan was known to have killed soldiers, civil servants, merchants. It had been entirely possible he’d be arrested, tortured, and executed—here in this village or back in Jingxian. Such a capture would be a career boost for the man who achieved it. Wang Fuyin might even have written Daiyan’s father with that in mind. It was not beyond the level of intrigue for ambitious civil servants.

  And yet, entering the yamen, he’d been as calm as he could remember. Composed, in the way he seemed to be before a raid or a fight. Combat never unsettled him. He’d learned that on a road near home.

  He understood that other men—men he commanded or opposed—might be dealing with gut-roiling fear at such moments, and he’d learned to assuage or exploit this. It was part of a man’s task if he wished to lead.

  He did wish to lead. And to honour his father and ancestors.

  That was what had led him to the yamen once he learned the magistrate had indeed arrived, as planned.

  Someone might have thought it was an act of fate, that the chief magistrate happened to have been summoned to deal with a crime in Dizeng so soon after Ren Daiyan and his companions came across the river.

  That would have been an innocent’s thought.

  Ziji knew the name and village of a man who’d tried to join them in the marsh two years ago. No one had trusted him. He was sent on his way, and followed. He lived alone at the edge of Dizeng Village, and it turned out he possessed a counterfeiting machine (it hadn’t been hard to discover this).

  The punishment for such possession was death. The man had never been arrested or even questioned. The only possible reason was that he was acting as an informer, identifying outlaws, salt and tea smugglers, tax evaders along this stretch of the river. Lives had been destroyed because of him.

  Ziji and two others took him on his way home from a pleasure house on their second night. He was killed in a nearby field, dramatically—a farmer’s scything hook.

  The scythe was cleaned reasonably well, but not perfectly, and returned to the shed of the man they intended to have arrested for the murder.

  This one had killed a woman east of here the year before. Her body had never been found (some of the lakes were very deep), but he had been identified to the outlaws, if not the law.

  Justice, along the river, took diverse forms.

  Daiyan had spent much of that night awake, disturbed by a question that had come to him. If they hadn’t known of these two men, would he have implemented his plan with ordinary country people: killing one, implicating another, to have the magistrate summoned?

  Under a summer moon he came to an answer. If you wanted to change the world, you couldn’t always do pleasant things.

  Sitting at the edge of a copse of trees while the others slept, looking out over silvered summer fields, he remembered old, old lines, bright as moonlight, sorrow-laden as willow twigs at parting:

  Wolves howl. I cannot find rest

  Because I am powerless

  To amend a broken world.

  Chan Du the poet, Ninth Dynasty, had lived before and through the years of the great rebellion. He had died during the fighting and the famine. Not far from here, in fact, travelling east along the river. His last home was a place of pilgrimage. Daiyan had been there, left twigs by the memorial stele.

  He wasn’t like Chan Du, and he was still young. He didn’t accept that the world as it came to them could not be changed. Amended.

  He wasn’t the boy who had fought imagined barbarians with a bamboo sword in a grove and yet, of course, he was and always would be. He went back to his cloak under the trees and slept until sunrise.

  They’d waited for the body in the field to be found and word to go east, and then for the chief magistrate to come from Jingxian to deal with a murder, as was his duty.

  A good leader gathered as much information as he could before moving a plan from his mind and sending it into the world. Even with that, there were many moments when you could not be sure of success, when you had to trust to ... something. The grace of the Queen Mother of the West, your alignment of stars and ancestors, the goodwill of other men. Spirits. Chance.

  He didn’t like such moments, which was why he was uneasy on that walk up the steps of the yamen again, to see the man whose life he’d saved those years ago.

  FUYIN HAD GIVEN the matter of Ren Daiyan careful thought since their encounter a few days earlier.

  He’d had time to do so. The murder had been swiftly solved by a device he’d used at the outset of his career, that first crime in Guan Family Village. He’d written about it, had been commended for ingenuity.

  It seemed likely in the present case that the victim had been killed by a scythe (limbs hacked off, lying near the body, not a pretty sight but he’d seen it before). Chief Magistrate Wang’s assistants set about gathering all the scythes in and around Dizeng. They laid them down in a meadow near hives of domestic bees. A crowd of onlookers gathered.

  The bees swarmed, quickly, over the scythe with blood on it.

  It was memorably dramatic.

  The owner of that scythe spent more time than most did protesting his innocence, but the magistrate’s men were experienced, good at all their tasks, and a confession was duly extracted that night.

  The man remained alive after questioning, which was good. He would be executed here. It was salutary for neighbours (and children) to see that done, carrying a message: the emperor’s justice could reach all the way to villages like Dizeng.

  They also took possession of a cou
nterfeiting device and a considerable number of false coins buried beneath the floor in the house of the victim. The chief magistrate’s report would indicate that a falling-out among criminals had very likely led to the murder, and it would redound to his name that he’d dealt with two major crimes at once.

  When Ren Daiyan walked into the yamen the second time, the evening after the murderer’s confession, Fuyin insisted that they go to the best of the singing girl houses. It wasn’t, in truth, so very good, but they were where they were, you made do.

  He arranged for food, baths for both of them, with attendants and flute music. He’d wondered if Daiyan would be anxious, unsettled.

  He saw no signs of this. The young man (he was still young) was both courteous and intense. He showed little lightness or humour that night (these would appear later). He was precise as to the ranks he expected for himself and his fellows as they left the outlaws of the marsh and joined the army of Kitai. He was explicit that he would never serve as a guard for a Flowers and Rocks party.

  Fuyin was in a position to agree to all of this, though he did propose a modification and, after a few questions, Ren Daiyan accepted.

  He and the other outlaws would not immediately be enlisted in the army. They would spend some time as the newly appointed senior guards of the chief magistrate of Jingxian. As such, Daiyan’s initial rank and pay would be equivalent to a military commander of one hundred, rising to that of five hundred in the New Year’s promotions in just a few months.

  This would make it easier for him to be offered an even larger command when he shifted to the army itself, which was—there was no ambiguity here—his fixed intention.

  He was going to fight in the north. That night he even quoted the old song to Fuyin ... We must take back our rivers and mountains.

  Many people still seemed to think that way, Fuyin thought, all these years after the treaty that had surrendered those lands below the Long Wall.

  Wang Fuyin was personally of the view that the silver and silk paid north came right back to them at the border markets. And a bought, sure peace was better than the uncertainty of war. He could (and he often did) point to the disaster of Erighaya as evidence of the damage warfare did.